Terrorists?
Maybe not. Maybe they're just victims of governmental over-reaching. These are examples why I believe we have more to fear from the government than we do from terrorists.
[via Dave Farber's IP list]
Questions grow as another US terror case collapses
By Edward Alden in Washington
September 23 2004
One year ago, a 25-year-old translator working for the US Air Force at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, was charged with crimes that could have brought him a death sentence. Ahmad al Halabi was accused of being part of an undercover spy ring passing secret information to Syria with the intent of damaging US efforts to fight the war on terror.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon dropped virtually all the charges against Mr Halabi, who was imprisoned for nearly a year, admitting that he posed no danger to the country and had done nothing worse than disobey orders by taking two unauthorised photographs of Camp Delta and accidentally carrying a copy of his classified orders to his living quarters on the base.
The astonishing collapse of the case against Mr Halabi is only the latest in what is becoming a catalogue of botched terrorism investigations. Two of the three men accused of being part of the Guant�namo spy ring have now been freed, while the other faces charges only of mishandling sensitive information....
The growing list of failed prosecutions is raising tough questions about why Washington has so often leveled terrorism accusations against innocent individual's.... For instance, of the nearly 1,200 individuals imprisoned on immigration violations after September 11 2001 on suspicion of having terrorist ties, not one was convicted of a terrorist offence. And of the roughly 100 convictions the Justice Department has obtained in terrorism investigations, virtually all have been for minor crimes not linked to terrorism....
28 Sep 2004 15:37 Eastern time UPDATE:
There's more info here.
Justice (Civil Liberties, so-called Intellectual Property, Privacy & Secrecy); Politics & Government (International, National, State, Local); Humor (Irony & the Funny or Unusual); Science & Technology (Astronomy, Computers, the Internet, e-Voting, Crypto, Physics & Space); Communication (Books, Film, Media, Music & the English Language); Economics (Corporatism & Consumerism); and Items of Purely Personal Note (including Genealogy, Photography, Religion & Spirituality).
